Why You Can't Get That Dinner Reservation

It's bad enough to be seated in Siberia (a phrase coined in the 1930s by socialite Peggy Hopkins Joyce upon being shown to a second-rate table at New York's El Morocco nightclub), but to not be able to get a table at all can be positively ego-killing.

Those dreaded words, "We're fully booked up until February 2013," or the weirdly clinical "We're fully committed," are enough to take the enamel off your back teeth and make you question whether you should have been nicer to that dork from Goldman Sachs who once said he could score a seat anywhere in town.

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Now, there are ways to get a table at a hot restaurant, the first of them being to ask for an early or late table. The fact is, even many of the most popular restaurants, jammed at 7 p.m. through 9 p.m., have tables at 5:30 or 6 p.m. or after 9:30. Or you could go for lunch, when the prospects are much better. Mondays (if the place is open) are better than the rest of the week. If you're in New York, Grub Street publishes table availabilities each weekday, telling you which hot spots are completely booked, which are mostly booked, and which will happily take you at prime time.

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One ploy that never works is screaming into the phone, "Do you have any idea who I am?" If you really are somebody, restaurants will know. And if you say you're calling for, say, Scarlett Johansson or Beyoncé Knowles, what will happen is they will take down your number and call you back, finding out you're a fake and a liar. Not good.

Of course, if you really do rep a celebrity of that caliber, the restaurant will of course have a table for you; even if you walk in off the street, they will carry in a table from the storeroom and set it up for you. Happens all the time.

But what about those restaurants that say they simply have no tables available at any hour for the next several weeks, or don't book tables more than a month out? Actually, things have changed in that regard. There was a time a decade ago when there were some restaurants so popular that it was indeed difficult to get a table even a week or two before. In fact, some snooty restaurateurs would turn away requests with the knowledge that by the time next Thursday rolled around, they'd be fully booked. A steakhouse like Peter Luger in Brooklyn has been so popular for so many years that even if you accept a table at 2:30 in the afternoon, you still might have to wait. Last time I was at Sparks Steak House in New York, I arrived for my confirmed 7 o'clock reservation and was told by the manager, "Yeah, everybody has a seven o'clock reservation. Wait at the bar. I'll call you."

But here's the real reason you can't get into most of the very hottest of hot restaurants — and a good reason to feel you are not a loser: Most of them are small, even tiny, with very few seats each night, and they don't open for lunch. So, if you're dying to get into Masa in New York, where a meal costs $450 per person before sake and there are exactly ten coveted seats at the sushi bar in front of chef-owner Masa Takayama, well, good luck.

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For 80 years now, there has rarely been an open table at the Italian-American restaurant Rao's in Harlem because its ten tables (it used to be eight) have been reserved literally for decades by its regulars; the only way to get a table is to know a regular who will not be showing up for his Tuesday night dinner, in which case he might give it away to you. I know a priest in Harlem who's had a regular table at Rao's and offers it to people in return for a charitable contribution to his parish. Prayer probably won't help. (Of course, none of this applies to the huge facsimile of Rao's in Caesars Palace in Vegas.)

David Chang's Momofuko Ko in New York only accepts reservations on its website as of ten o'clock each morning, and by 10:01, just about every seat at the counter, with backless stools — all 12 of them — are taken. The hyped Chicago restaurant Alinea, closed Mondays and Tuesdays and only open for dinner ($195 per person), has about 40 seats, and its newer sibling, Next, books only ten to fifteen tables each day and only accepts two or four people at each, unless you take the chef's table for six, which runs $2,500. Reservations book up two months in advance, and Craigslist seems to be the only way to get one. Another tough Chicago spot, Schwa, has only 26 seats for its $110 tasting menu.

The newly celebrated Noma in Copenhagen (who knew?) is now taking reservations through January 2012, but good luck snaring one of its 12 tables. And had you ever tried to book a dinner at the exalted, now-defunct El Bulli outside of Barcelona for its 30-plus-course meals, you'd have had to do it more than a year in advance for one of Ferran Adria's 50 seats, with one seating per night in a space only open for six months of the year. Adria said the restaurant consistently lost money.

Do you see a pattern here? All of these restaurants, however good or overrated they might be, only have to fill a small number of tables each night and be open when they wish to be and not open for lunch at all if they don't want to be. In fact, it's long been a tradition in Paris that the ever-booked, three-star restaurants are not open on what you'd think is the most popular night of the week — Saturday — because they don't need the business. They take the weekend off.

On any given night, there will always be enough gourmets, celebrities, investment-banker types, and people who just want to brag to fill these small spaces whenever they're open. Most of the time, you gotta know somebody who knows somebody to even get somebody on the phone.

So, you're not a schmuck — unless you really would sell your soul just to go to such restaurants when cities from New York and Chicago to Copenhagen and Paris are full of truly great restaurants with plenty of seats that stand ready to accept your reservation a day or two in advance (even the same day if you can come after nine o'clock). And I don't know of any restaurants these days in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Washington, or Boston where you'd need more than a few days to get a table.

Hot spots come and go, and many go under after six months in the spotlight, so adopt a wait-and-see attitude if you're interested in dining well and being served amiably. 99 percent of the world's great restaurants would love to have you for dinner... right now.

But what about greasing the palm of the maître d, wink, wink? You can try it, but if a restaurant like Per Se in New York or the Wolsey in London is full-up, it won't work, and if the guy at the front desk is the owner, he's going to turn you down flat. Of course, a heavy — and I mean heavy — greasing of several palms at evening's end will push you way up the "A" list to get in next time. The late plumbing contractor John Gotti used to tip the waitstaff by doubling the amount of the bill, and he always got a good table. That is, until he started taking his meals through a slot in solitary up the river.